Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[aesteval]

Something struck me as amusing last week but I couldn't find this thread to chime in. It's about those Black Mage / Thaumaturge bots running around.

1) they're really kind of creepy
2) they're amusingly appropriate given FF9's use of Black Mages

That said there was about a week in which I didn't see much in the way of spam. Now it's back with a vengeance. Was easier to ignore by disabling the sound effect for /tell. But recently I've been trying to keep an eye on the log for certain things. Really difficult to watch the log when there's constant spam coming in so I had to disable /tell logging. Hope nobody uses /tell for something useful in this game because it's not feasible to pay attention to it with all the spam.

[Whiteprincess]

Allow ppl to sell a house. My fC lost 56 million trying to buy a large before. We got scammed and the head gm said there Is nothing they can do about it. Selling Is against the game rules. Gil sellers are on party finder selling hours every day because they know se won't go after them /sad

[MilesSaintboroguh]

Allow ppl to sell a house. My fC lost 56 million trying to buy a large before. We got scammed and the head gm said there Is nothing they can do about it. Selling Is against the game rules. Gil sellers are on party finder selling hours every day because they know se won't go after them /sad

Really? I'd try another GM because as far as I was told, creating a deal/agreement between parties and then one side not fulfilling their end of the bargain is a big no no, more so if you got proof of the agreement.

[Zirael_Foxfire]

Saying reporting helps while they still refuse to give us the proper reporting tool we've been asking for since the game started ...

Give the guys some slack. If you read Heavensward credits after last cut scene, you'll see that the Special Task Force consists of two people and a supervisor. The less reports they have to sift through, the easier their job.
Plus, bots and RMT used to supply like 90% of crystals and shards on AH. Remember good old days you could craft in peace not worrying about going dry on your crystal supply?

[Zirael_Foxfire]

Really? I'd try another GM because as far as I was told, creating a deal/agreement between parties and then one side not fulfilling their end of the bargain is a big no no, more so if you got proof of the agreement.

I was under this impression too, unless SEs policy has changed and now you can scam other players without worry? Would be nice to get official clarification on that.

[Niwashi]

Anyone else notice the RMT bots in Coerthas spamming FATEs now? Must have gotten the idea from players botting FATEs in North Than.

-They use classes, not jobs.
-Their gear is 20-30 levels lower than them.
-They don't have a FC or GC.
-Their names aren't jibberish, but instead 2 word sentences.

Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out they are not a legit player.

What about the free companies named like "asdfds" with somewhere around 5 characters in them, are still rank one after months of been created, are all mostly summoners with ifrit-egi, are all wearing level 45+ bought gear to spirit bond and killing the same things over and over (which usually consist of ornery karakul's)... pretty sure they don't need investigating.

The issue in both these cases is that, no matter how clearly suspicious, none of those things are actually against the rules. Before SE can ban those accounts, they have to verify the actual RMT transaction taking place, since that's the part that is against the rules. (And also because that will lead them to finding the buyers whom they also want to stop.) That's where the investigation part comes in. The task force needs to monitor these bots to track where their gil goes.

Their basic approach to that part isn't too far off the mark. The main thing is simply that they clearly aren't tracking enough of them or stopping them soon enough. (That could just point to being severely undermanned, or could be a lack of suitable tools for efficiently tracking the info they need. I suspect a combination of both.)

Where they're really dropping the ball, though, is on the advertising spam. There's nothing to be investigated there. Spam-bots wouldn't be handling the gil, so they aren't going to lead SE's investigators to other accounts. And it's their spam itself that's against the rules. There's no excuse for not putting in the tools to be able to stop them immediately as soon as they start sending it.

[Sicno]

Greetings,

We would like to share a comment we received from the Special Task Force (STF).

I understand all this, and I totally agree that the investigation of farming bots and potential gil buyers needs to be very carefully made. Now, there needs to be a difference between reporting and investigating farmers/buyers and reporting and investigating chat spammers, since that's something that should be able to be verified very fast. No long investigation needed in this case, just a look at a few messages containing advertisement should be enough to identify a breach to the ToS.

So, as opposed to what some players suggest, I don't think a "right click report player" (that could be abused) is that good an idea. What we really need is a "right click report MESSAGE" feature. Add this to the menu displayed when you right click on a player name next to their message on the chatlog, the same menu that already has the "add to blacklist" feature. I'm guessing one issue with investigating spammers who use /tell is that you can't go reading private messages right away. I'm guessing that you can't openly browse their /tell history, and that's why you need us to copy and paste the spam message in our report so that you can do a search and see if it's there somewhere in their history. But with a "report message" feature you could get a direct link to the message in question and take immediate action.

[Mikaka]

Mikaka Meiakanaka from Excalibur world here. I'm snappy-happy to report that since HEAVENSWARD launched, I've gotten a total of FOUR RMT /tells, ZERO RMT Friend Requests, ZERO /shouts, and ZERO /says.Excalibur is almost RMT-free!

[LandricFrey]

Holy #@$! An official response to an RMT thread! Subs must be dropping sooner than I thought! I can't think of any other reason they'd reply to a topic they've been silent about since day one.

[MilesSaintboroguh]

Holy #@$! An official response to an RMT thread! Subs must be dropping sooner than I thought! I can't think of any other reason they'd reply to a topic they've been silent about since day one.

Because clearly that is the case.